Critical Reflections on the Deserving/Undeserving Distinction Noah D
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Poverty Unmodified?: Critical Reflections on the Deserving/Undeserving Distinction Noah D. Zatz ABSTRACT According to a familiar and influential analysis, antipoverty programs are structured UCLA LAW REVIEW UCLA LAW by distinctions between the deserving and undeserving poor. Through techniques like behavioral conditions on benefit eligibility, these moral distinctions divide the poor and interfere with providing assistance to all those in need. This analytical framework animates much critical scholarship on social welfare policy and guides most welfare rights litigation about benefit eligibility requirements. This Essay challenges this “deservingness analytic” by questioning its separation of deservingness from need, its imagination of the poor as a preexisting population whose need can be conceptualized and determined apart from the moralistic concerns of deservingness. This supposed divide between deservingness and need is breached from both sides: Seemingly moralistic concerns with personal behavior often can be recast as assessments of economic need, and conventional techniques of measuring economic need inevitably implicate moralistic questions about personal behavior. Both phenomena become apparent once we unpack the conventional idea that the extent of “available” resources necessarily affects whether any needs are unmet. Dismantling the barrier between deservingness and need facilitates new critical perspectives on both concepts. The implicit moral content of need assessments becomes visible and contestable, not for moralism alone but for moral error. I sketch such an argument with regard to the ubiquitous exclusion of childcare from the needs considered by means-tested benefits. Because behavioral conditions and need assessments are linked, new accounts of need also produce new accounts of conditions. For instance, broadening needs to incorporate childcare leads to broadening what should qualify as “work” under a work requirement, the quintessential behavioral eligibility condition. AUTHOR Noah D. Zatz is Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. This Essay is based on remarks delivered at UCLA School of Law at Poverty and the Bureaucratic State: A Symposium in Honor of Joel Handler, and I am grateful for the comments and inspiration offered by participants in the symposium. I have benefitted from feedback on earlier drafts from Arudra Burra and Jon Michaels and from research assistance by Mark Hammes and Melissa Rose. An academic essay cannot do justice to my admiration for and gratitude to Joel Handler, but I dedicate this to him as an effort in that direction. 59 UCLA L. REV. 550 (2012) TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ............................................................................................................552 I. The Analytical Separation of Deservingness and Need .......................556 A. Deservingness, the Critique of Conditionality, and the Embrace of Need .....................................................................................................556 B. The Deservingness Analytic in Court ......................................................563 II. The Inevitable Normativity of Need ........................................................572 A. The Moral Construction of Poverty Measurement ..................................573 B. The Progressive Potential of Revisiting the Morality of Need .................583 Conclusion ...............................................................................................................592 551 552 59 UCLA L. REV. 550 (2012) INTRODUCTION According to a widely influential account, a basic feature of social welfare policy in the United States is its relentless differentiation between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. This familiar observation almost inevitably carries with it a criticism: Something is amiss when “moral” distinctions, such as those related to sexuality or the work ethic, interfere with assisting all those in need. Not only are the poor divided along moral lines, but the very process of division marks even those ultimately deemed deserving, subjecting them to behavioral conditions, administrative discretion, and state surveillance that never would be inflicted on other citizens. The critical deployment of the deserving/undeserving distinction invites us to imagine a world in which we stripped away moral impositions and dealt directly with poverty, unmodified.1 This Essay challenges this familiar “deservingness analytic.” The deserv- ingness analytic’s weakness lies in the notion that the deserving/undeserving distinction is something superimposed on a preexisting population of “the poor,” a group that has “needs” that can be conceptualized and determined apart from the moralistic concerns of deservingness. To the contrary, this Essay shows that the supposed divide between deservingness and need is breached from both sides: Seemingly moralistic concerns with personal behavior routinely can be recast as assessments of economic need, and conventional techniques of measuring economic need inevitably implicate similar moral questions about personal behavior. Perhaps no one has built a richer body of scholarship upon the deserving/undeserving distinction than Joel Handler. He captured its critical spirit succinctly in his remarkably resilient 1972 book Reforming the Poor, which closes by embracing a “more radical view of poverty [that] would rid welfare policy of all notions of deserving versus undeserving; the emphasis would be primarily on lack of income.”2 Doing so would “plac[e] all of the poor into the deserving category [and], by removing fault or responsibility as a consid- eration, make reformation irrelevant as a condition of relief.”3 Thus, as it was then and is today, poverty would be defined by low income, but, contrary to established practice, this condition alone would suffice to command relief with 1. Cf. CATHARINE A. MACKINNON, FEMINISM UNMODIFIED (1987). 2. JOEL F. HANDLER, REFORMING THE POOR 140 (1972). 3. Id. at 141. Poverty Unmodified 553 income transfers, without further eligibility restrictions. In Handler’s view, neither this definition of the problem nor its solution implicates the moral morass of fault and responsibility associated with nonfinancial, and particularly behavioral, eligibility conditions. Explaining why, in fact, social policy wades into that morass is a task Handler took up in his later work with Yeheskel Hasenfeld, especially their 1991 classic The Moral Construction of Poverty.4 By separating a core of poverty relief from an overlay of moral distinction between the deserving and undeserving, the deservingness analytic also suggests a straightforward legal strategy: First, characterize income-based transfer payments as the core of antipoverty programs, and then attack additional eligibility restrictions as extraneous moralistic impositions that threaten transfer recipients’ equality and liberty. Indeed, that fairly well captures the underlying structure of most welfare rights litigation over substantive eligibility rules. In the 1968 breakthrough victory in King v. Smith,5 the U.S. Supreme Court itself attributed to the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) statute an approach “considerably more sophisticated and enlightened than the ‘worthy-person’ concept of earlier times”6 and struck down a state policy provision as “unrelated to need, because the actual financial situation of the family is irrelevant.”7 In a rare Supreme Court success of recent decades, Saenz v. Roe8 likewise emphasized the disconnect between a durational residency requirement and recipients’ “need for benefits.”9 One unfortunate consequence of the deservingness analytic is that it chan- nels critical scrutiny away from the mechanisms for identifying the poor and their needs. Thus, while the staples of deservingness analysis—labor market participation, reproduction, and the formation and maintenance of family ties— have received rich, interdisciplinary attention, matters of poverty definition and measurement have been dominated by economists, with precious little 10 engagement between these literatures. 4. JOEL F. HANDLER & YEHESKEL HASENFELD, THE MORAL CONSTRUCTION OF POVERTY (1991). 5. 392 U.S. 309 (1968). 6. Id. at 324–25. 7. Id. at 320. 8. 526 U.S. 489 (1999). 9. Id. at 507. 10. For introductions to the vast literature on poverty measurement and its reform, see MEASURING POVERTY: A NEW APPROACH (Constance F. Citro & Robert T. Michael eds., 1995); Rebecca M. Blank, Presidential Address: How to Improve Poverty Measurement in the United States, 27 J. POL’Y ANALYSIS & MGMT. 233 (2008). This literature tends to treat poverty measurement 554 59 UCLA L. REV. 550 (2012) Handler’s own work has provided an important, albeit partial, exception to this neglect of means-testing practices, though this part of his corpus is less well known. His groundbreaking 1971 study with Ellen Hollingsworth, The 11 “Deserving Poor,” not only examined the administration of means testing but also briefly questioned the soundness of distinguishing between financial tests of need and behavioral conditions. Within a system where financial eligibility compares needs to resources, “[r]esources can also include the earning potential of the members of the family, that is, anticipated earnings.”12 In other words, the classic basis for undeservingness—failure to work—can be seen as implicating the determination of need formally assigned to financial eligibility standards. In complementary fashion, Last Resorts, Handler’s 1983 monograph